The economic collapse has big implications for marketers who are already sick of social media (admit it, you know you’re sick of it—at least a little bit). Cost cuts are coming—if they haven’t arrived already—and marketing is going to have to re-prioritize (again).
In other words, you’re going to be doing more social media marketing, whether you like it or not.
ITSMA research shows that customers consistently favor live events that let them mingle (and job hunt) with their peers. It’s human nature. We’re social animals and sales pitches always look better through beer goggles and sound better when interspersed with good conversation with people you know and trust.
But events are expensive. And travel is always the first thing to go in a downturn.
Meanwhile, digital marketing (I make a distinction between digital marketing and social media) has made slow progress for two reasons: First, Webcasts, e-mail marketing, and microsites are not substitutes for cornering C-level executives by the buffet table. Second, digital marketing is less expensive than pressing the flesh, but it isn’t exactly cheap, either. If you want to create a program, you need to build an infrastructure and maintain it. So while digital marketing is the fastest growing part of the marcom budget, it’s still a smaller portion of the budget than collateral.
Meanwhile, social media isn’t just cheap, it’s free. Just go to Wordpress.com and you’ll see what I mean.
But we hate social media. Of course, when I use the word hate, what I really mean is fear.
As marketers, we are terrified of social media.
We are terrified for some rational (though preventable) reasons, like giving away sensitive company information or sullying our carefully crafted brand images.
But we are also terrified for one very important, irrational reason: social media marketing seems like a Murder One sentence. You’re going away and you’re going away for a long, long time. Indeed, the only thing scarier for marketers than being responsible for a corporate blog where people can say anything they want about you and your brand is the prospect of having to sustain it—to keep coming up with smart, thoughtful things to say. FOREVER.
Since you are going to have to do more social media marketing whether you like it or not, here’s some advice for keeping your sanity:
- Don’t wait for your social media programs to die—plan for them to die. Social media has a teenager complex. It feels like such a young phenomenon (even though it isn’t—anyone remember message boards?) that no one goes into it planning for it to die. Companies start open-ended blogs only to watch them suffer a slow, painful, premature deaths due to lack of direction, accountability or content. Why not declare its death prematurely? You probably already know the issues that your customers really care about. Pick one and create a blog or podcast series designed to end within a specified—but meaningful—period of time, such as after completing a research project on the topic.
- Go outside the firewall. So many marketers can’t bring themselves to start social media programs because they fear the implications for their companies (and their own careers). So put your programs outside the firewall. It’ll be cheaper, too. And don’t restrict employees from getting involved. Just have a clear and simple policy about employee conduct and require a disclaimer if they are going to act as representatives of the company.
- Integrate and cross-reference. Blogs should reference podcasts, which should reference the website, which should reference online communities inside and outside the organization. One of the reasons that social media does poorly is that there are not enough traffic drivers. Make them yourself.
- Comments don’t matter. People are lazy. Research shows that fewer than 10 percent of people contribute any kind of content and less than two percent are active, regular contributors to online communities. The most important thing is to create quality content. Readers will appreciate it, even if they never say so.
- Popularity is irrelevant. B2B buyers don’t consume marketing content because they want to, they do it because they have to. They are looking at your stuff because they are researching. If they only visit your blog once but they get useful information, that’s what matters.
- Social media sucks—get used to it. Many marketers complain to me about the quality of blogs, videos, and podcasts. I ask them, why should we expect new forms of media be any different from the ones we already know?
- Reassign PR people to develop online influence. Journalism is disappearing. Assigning ten PR people to harangue the two remaining editors at your favorite trade pubs won’t do anyone any good. I can remember when the editorial staff of my alma mater, CIO magazine, didn’t fit in a large conference room. Now they can share a cab. Believe me, they don’t have time to read your press releases. Reassign some of those aggressive PR people to aggressively build your online reputation with influential bloggers and online communities. If the targets don’t exist, have them create some.
The time for experimentation in social media is over. Pretty soon, it might be the only new thing you can afford to do.
